Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Dan Rather is now a magnet for criticism. He is pilloried by not just from those intent on shining a light on the ‘liberal media,’ but by those who want to advance the theory that the old order passeth.

Last week, too, another group was out there tossing rotten tomatoes at the New York advertising celebration of advertising icons such as Tony the Tiger and California Raisins. I don't agree with the argument that these milestones of advertising are best forgotten. The Michelin Man, the Energizer bunny, and even Smokey Bear did serve a purpose –maybe not the same purpose today, as they did a few decades ago. (Imagine how boring insurance advertising would be without the Aflac duck and the Geico reptile?)

Looking at the week’s events, the icons are not the most important –they simply grab the most media, because they can’t help generating PR like they were supposed to! The topics of Advertising Week included pressing issues such as “Barbarians at the remote” and “life without the Internet,” so it’s hard to complain that these Madison Avenue types are are a backward looking bunch.

Scott Donaton, in Advertising Age (Sept. 20, 2004) makes an important observation about the irony of the “march of icons’ in a city (NYC) that is hardly the center of the advertising universe today. He correctly calls the event a sort of self-congratulatory gesture of an industry needing to restore confidence in itself. But, hey, the 4As chairman Ken Kaess stated it as one of the week’s objectives! Of the 3 groups targeted by this event, the ad industry was on the top of his list. (for the record, the 'general public' was # 3 on the list!) This 'confidence' thing is not an American ad agency problem, for sure. I worked at JWT and O&M in Sri Lanka, and we battled with these issues almost fifteen years ago!

But I do agree, that there are other pressing issues. In the same issue of Ad Age, an editorial on P&G underscores the point about how the ad industry needs to get to grips with reality –the issue of ‘agency conflict.’ This obsession with the competition –competing agencies, that is—has more serious consequences than a fixation over Mr. Whipple.

To get back to the conenction between ad bashing and 'Rather'-bashing, the new thinking in journalism won’t come by banishing a 70-year old veteran. It will arrive when the networks face up to the reality that the Net has whetted people’s appetites for ‘just the news’ –that is news that is not fixated on the old ‘icons’ of journalism --sound-bites and toppling presidents.

The companion study on the Internet by UCLA's Center for Communication Policy, released January 2004, challenges one of the basic findings of the Annenberg study (posted 09/25) in that TRUST in online content gets better rating!

“Clearly, use of the Internet is reducing television viewing around the world while having little impact on positive aspects of social life, most Internet users generally trust the information they find online and Internet use is having a major impact on life in urban China.”

What it found similar to the Annenberg findings, was that TV watching was greatly impacted by the Net --negatively.

Saturday, September 25, 2004

It had to come to this sooner or later. The Annenberg School's Digital Future Project released data to show that online activity overtook that other screen activity a.k.a. television watching. And this was results about 2003.

Television producers, content folk, and even those like ad agencies who built their world over this television economy have to be worried.

Not all advertising people think of this as a negative. Some look to the shift away from television (for the likes of P&G) as a positive sign. Read a long, very thoughtful analysis of the tragedy of the advertising commons by Matthew Syrett here at MarketingProfs. Mat says that:

The owners of the mass media channels themselves seem more likely candidates for effecting positive changes to the rules by which the advertisers compete, and therefore altering the forces behind the tragedy of the commons. By playing with the ways that media is sold and placed, the media channel owners could radically rework the means by which advertisers relate to consumers and each other, which in turn could alter the entire dynamic of advertising for the better.

Before we start gloating over the positive news about online behavior, here's a reality check: The Annenberg report also found that people don't consider the Internet as a reliable source of news. The confidence in the Net has been declining over the years!

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Dan Gilmore suggests that CBS should do a “60 minutes” on “60 minutes” to uncover the truth behind the memo scandal. See here.

Dan Rather did come around to apologizing, but that’s certainly not the end of the story

For the record, here is what the aboutface looked like:

I believe that the witnesses and the documents are authentic. We wouldn't have gone to air if they would not have been. There isn't going to be -- there's no -- what you're saying apology?
Dan Rather, on CNN –Friday, September 17, 2004

And then came:

"I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers," he said. "We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry," Rather added.
Dan Rather, CBS, web site, Monday, Sept 20, 2004

Bloggers will note the recurring theme behind this story, of the blogosphere vs the big media. See Jonah Goldberg's article
Also, it's good to see this controversy in the light of former CBS producer Bernard Goldberg's book, BIAS. Goldberg recently suggested that Dan is behaving like Nixon, a president Mr. Rather helped bring down.

Thursday, September 16, 2004

Unlike Tuesday's post, about the importance of text over image, the protester in Batman costume shows us how images grab us --and the media.

It is one of the most photographed 'homes' in the world, so it's not just the media who were targeted, but all those tourists who fill rolls of film (OK, memory cards) at the palace gates. Interestingly Batman had used a digital camera himself to plan his PR stunt.

Camera stunts will no doubt increase as society gets enveloped by digital cameras embedded in phones. Interestingly, on the political side, two PR stunts have been back and forth in the news.

In July, the Drudge Report focused on John Kerry's Vietnam controversy as a camera stunt, while last year, CBS and other news outlets once floated the theory that Bush's Top Gun landing on an aircraft carrier was an event designed for the cameras.

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

They tracked the eye movements of 46 people for one hour as they read mock news sites and real multimedia content. Most telling is that people’s eyes are drawn to text first (contrary to poplar wisdom about ‘image is everything’). Sites studied included such important news sites as USAToday.com, NYTimes.com, CNN.com, LATimes.com, Guardian.co.uk (even Phoenix’s AZCentral.com) and several others.

The usual suspects --subheads, short paragraphs, italics, bullets – still work, but it’s amazing how important design and layout is for Web pages. Small headlines and no hyperlinks got better read-throughs, for instance.

Saturday, September 11, 2004

Sony and Apple may be the two most creative companies on the planet. I say this not just because I am a Vaio user, and a Mac follower. The marketing, design and PR around the iMac, the Sony-Ericsson phones, and the Walkman are stories we relate around campfires and boardrooms. (Did you know it’s the 25th anniversary of the Walkman?)

Then there’s iTunes, a whole new ballgame, and there’s the NW-HD1 (extreme left image) from Sony, the iPod killer –at least from Sony’s point of view.

No matter what device emerges or what download service grabs the limelight (even Wal-Mart has an $.88 cents a tune download service, and Microsoft isn’t far behind) you can trust Steve Jobs to always generate the kind of PR that translates into sales.

Friday, September 03, 2004

I often write on the changing interface (and our relationship with) mobile phones, so this one caught my attention.

Have you heard about a phone company called e28? No? That’s because it’s based in Shanghai. The product, the e2800 on the left, may look like a phone, but it is more about data than voice. The secret? It’s the first Linux phone! The PDA/camera/Internet access combination makes it a hand held PC that happens to look like a phone.

Speaking of the changing use of the cell phone, also on the market, from Sprint, is a service called MobiTV, a way to watch news from NBC and ABC, FOX Sports, cartoons, weather etc.

Thursday, September 02, 2004

You've got to think of him as a communicator, with an interesting medium whether or not you agree with his message. Kinberg's tactic, using a bicycle equipped with a laptop and a wireless connection, just got him arrested. His techno-artistic project involves spraying the sidewalk with messages --protest messages at that-- uploaded by visitors to his Web site.

His arrest on Sunday, opens up an interesting debate on what constiitutes a legitimate guerilla campaign. Recall when Micsosoft plastered sidewalks with plastic decals of the MSN butterfly in 2002? New York city fined then $50, but no one at the ad agency (McCann-Erickson) got arrested for that. Also, Kinberg was arrested while talking to MSBC's Ron Reagan (see Chris Mathew's blog) and not while riding his bike!

This trend bears watching, because PR and MarCom is poised to start appropriating creative tactics that tap into technology like this.